1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to field of e-mail management and more particularly to the field unsolicited commercial e-mail filtering.
2. Description of the Related Art
Historically, the print medium served as the principal mode of unsolicited mass advertising on the part of the direct marketing industry. Typically referred to as “junk mail”, unsolicited print marketing materials could be delivered in bulk to a vast selection of recipients, regardless of whether the recipients requested the marketing materials. With an average response rate of one to two percent, junk mail has been an effective tool in the generation of new sales leads. Nevertheless, recipients of junk mail generally find the practice to be annoying. Additionally, postage for sending junk mail can be expensive for significant “mail drops”. Consequently, the direct marketing industry constantly seeks equally effective, but less expensive modalities for delivering unsolicited marketing materials.
The advent of electronic mail has provided much needed relief for direct marketers as the delivery of electronic mail to a vast number of targeted recipients requires no postage. Moreover, the delivery of unsolicited electronic mail can be an instantaneous exercise and the unsolicited electronic mail can include embedded hyperlinks to product or service information thus facilitating an enhanced response rate for the “mail drop”. Still, as is the case in the realm of print media, unsolicited electronic mail, referred to commonly as “spam”, remains an annoyance to consumers worldwide. As a result, an entire cottage industry of “spam filters” has arisen whose task solely is the eradication of spam.
Combating spam in many ways relates to the degree of trust in which an e-mail recipient has in an e-mail sender. For many e-mail users, e-mails are opened only when a sender of an e-mail message is both recognized and trusted. All other e-mails are ignored, automatically routed to a “junk mail” folder, or otherwise filed away without first permitting recipient review. For those who receive only a few e-mails each day, this mental spam filter can be of no consequence. However, for corporate and industrial users receiving dozens if not hundreds of e-mails per day, many important e-mails can go unopened simply because the recipient did not immediately recognize the sender of the unopened e-mail message.
In the context of social networking, establishing trust between communicants has been integral to the social networking fabric from the start. A social network refers to a social structure of nodes each associated with a different person or organization. The interconnections of each node reflect direct relationships between the respective people and organizations such that the directness of a relationship between two persons or organizations associated with respective nodes can be summarized by the path of interconnections between the respective nodes. In this way, any one individual in a social network can evaluate the number and quality of social relationships with others in the network, those relationships ranging from close familial bonds to casual acquaintances.
Many commercial social networking systems require an implicit recognition of trust before permitting two users of the social network to fully interact with one another. Still others suggest trust by expressing to an “invited” user a justification for another user to engage in a social networking link. For instance, in one well known social networking environment, an “invite” to become “friends” with another user can be couched in terms of “you know this person through [blank] connection” where the [blank] indicates a person or institution likely to give rise to a sense of trust in the recipient. In another social networking environment, trusted members can be requested to “endorse” another member so as to bolster a level of trust in the member to be accorded by unknown other members.